Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Cli-fi literature enlisted to create college climate change agents

Move over, sci-fi. Cli-fi is the cool new literary genre taking English Departments across the world by storm.

Colleges and universities worldwide are making cli-fi,
short for climate fiction, part of their curriculums to teach
humanities students the same lessons about environmental issues that
their more science-minded peers have been soaking up for years. But
people who believe those lessons lack a solid scientific foundation say
it’s important to balance them with a reminder: People are neither the
villains of the earth nor its saviors.

Books—old and new—with themes of dramatic climate change are classified now as cli-fi. H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine are good examples. More recent books, like Margaret Atwood’s TheYear of the Flood, which examines climate change, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, about water wars in the southwestern United States, also fall in the new genre.

Piquing students’ interest in science and the
environment is a good thing, said Wesley J. Smith, senior fellow at the
Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Growing up in Los
Angeles in the 1950s, Smith remembers the smog that prevented him from
seeing the mountains while he played outside on summer days. The smog
made his lungs hurt, he told me, and he’s glad environmentalists
“pursued human thriving” to succeed at making California’s air and
rivers cleaner.

But students reading books with environmental themes
need to understand that showing respect for human worth and dignity goes
hand-in-hand with showing respect for the environment, Smith said. The
same technology said to impose negative effects on the earth also gives
hope to people trying to survive.

...Last year, Janet Napolitano, the University of
California system president, announced $1,200 incentives for faculty to
incorporate sustainability and climate topics into existing curriculum.
The university system also plans to select a faculty “climate-action
champion” after soliciting proposals from faculty of all disciplines for
activities that promote “campus-wide leadership in carbon neutrality
and sustainability issues,” according to the university’s website.
Faculty champions will receive a $25,000 award to fund their proposals.

Middle-school video game enthusiasts
can get in on the cli-fi action, too, by playing a game designed to
teach them about environmental science. The Department of Education
awarded a $900,000 grant to a project called Eco. It’s similar to Minecraft but with a “few added twists,” according to The Washington Post. The object of the game is to make a community that can withstand an imminent ecological disaster. The company behind Eco, Strange Loop Games, said if players fail the “global survival game” the result is “server-wide perma death.”

Of course, cli-fi themes also are prevalent in Hollywood, with movies like The Day After Tomorrow, Interstellar, and even Sharknado and Happy Feet Two...